Gottshall, Margaret

ORAL HISTORY OF MARGARET GOTTSHALL
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
April 10, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay Margaret let’s begin by asking you first when and why you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Ms. Gottshall: Okay, I came in August. I think it was August the 23rd I got here, 1945, and I came because I was given a job teaching school. I had been here in the summer of ’43. My brother-in-law was Assistant Project Manager with the Corps of Engineers and he was in Harriman, he and his wife lived in Harriman, and so I came to visit them when school was out in Ohio. I had been teaching in Ohio, so I came here to visit them for the summer, and Paul brought me over here just to see Oak Ridge. And, of course, it wasn’t like it is now. I remember a great big long line from that Central Cafeteria in Townsite, and he told me that was people going in to eat lunch, and we stopped in front of the Tennessee Eastman Building because that’s where his business – that’s where he had to go to talk to someone. His office wasn’t here. He spent most of his time in, I think, Knoxville at the court, because there were land acquisitions, and they had gotten this land, and they had several lawsuits about the land.
Mr. Kolb: He was in the Corps of Engineers you say?
Ms. Gottshall: He was from the Corps of Engineers. He was just the Assistant Project Manager. Their office was in Harriman and he would go into Knoxville most times, but sometimes he had to come into Oak Ridge to see some of the people. So while I was sitting there – now this was in ’43 – while I was sitting there, I thought, well gosh, I don’t want to just sit there. Well, I didn’t have a pass to do anything else, but I was right in front of the employment office, so I went in and I thought, well I’ll just go in and apply for a job. I had a job in Ohio because I had signed another contract to teach the next year, but I really didn’t want to go back up there; it was too cold. But I had signed a contract, so I went in and I did what you do to apply for a job, and boy were they eager, they were really eager to hire people. Well, they started me on my, you know, whatever they do when they’re hiring you, and they told me to come back the next day. Well when I got out, and when Paul and I left, I said could he bring me over again the next day and he said, “Why, sure, I can bring you over.” So I did come over the next day and finish that up, but meanwhile, someone had been in his office. He was recruiting teachers and he was from Etowah, Tennessee, or from Athens, from that county down there. He had come in there and was just talking and he was looking for teachers and Paul said, “I know a teacher, but I think she’s got a job.” And so Paul told me that night and I said, “Well, tell him if he comes in there again that maybe I’d be interested in his teaching,” ’cause I really didn’t like it in Ohio, even though my dad was from Ohio and I had been there for summers all my life; we’d gone up to visit my grandparents. So I told him, he talked to the man, the man did come and see me, and I said, “Well, if I can get released from my contract in Ohio, I would like the job.” It was at Etowah. It was in Etowah, Tennessee, teaching Physical Education, and that’s what I majored in, but in Ohio, I taught very little Physical Education. I taught General Science and Biology and Geography and, you know, whatever they had left over, they always give to a new teacher. And so I wrote to the superintendent in Ohio and asked to be released, and he wrote me back. It had been about a week or more, and he wrote me back and said, well, since I was going to work for the government, he would release me. Oak Ridge had already investigated me, see, and he thought I was going to work for the government, and so I didn’t tell him I was going to teach school in another place, but, well, he didn’t ask me, he just assumed I was going to work for the government. Well, I didn’t even know I had a job with the government yet, you know. So I took the job at Etowah, and I was there two years, and I’d got the job up here too. After I got to Etowah, they called and wanted me to come, but it wasn’t teaching, see, because the schools didn’t open until October.
Mr. Kolb: I see, of ’43?
Ms. Gottshall: Uh-huhn. They might have been looking for teachers, but that wasn’t what I applied for. I don’t know what I was going to do. And so I just called them back and told them that I was employed and I didn’t want the job up here. So I stayed in Etowah two years, and meanwhile I met some people who were teaching school up here, and so I applied at the end of that first year. Well, wait a minute, I can’t remember when I wrote for an application, but I wrote up here for an application and I got one and I sent it in, and meanwhile I was teaching my second year at Etowah. Well, they called me and wanted me to come up here, but I was already teaching down there, the second year, so I didn’t think it was fair to leave them without a teacher and to come up here, so I told them I wasn’t interested anymore up here. So I taught a year in Etowah and I was coaching basketball. Well, I’d really never played basketball except in a gym class, ’cause they didn’t play it in Kentucky. We didn’t have girls basketball, you know, varsity basketball in Kentucky then.
Mr. Kolb: Probably didn’t here in Tennessee either.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes they did. They had basketball in Tennessee for girls a long time. I coached the girls team at Etowah, and I really had to work pretty hard. I don’t guess I was too good a coach, but I coached it for two years. I didn’t know I had it when I went down there. They didn’t tell me I had to coach the girls and do boys and girls in gym, but I enjoyed the gym part. The boys were really good because they loved to do things. The girls okay, but anyway, I had been coaching for two years and I asked for a supplement for coaching basketball and they didn’t give the girls a supplement. They gave the man a supplement, but they didn’t give the woman a supplement. I don’t know, maybe ’cause I was teaching gym, they figured I was getting enough. But anyway, they wouldn’t give me the supplement. So that was at the end of ’45, I mean, at the end of the school year, and that summer I went to Louisville. My sister and her husband were up there, and I was there the day the war ended in ’45. I meanwhile had written to Oak Ridge again. I thought, well, I’ll just go to Oak Ridge to teach, so I wrote for another application. While I was in Louisville, I got a wire from Oak Ridge and they said I’d been assigned to Jefferson Junior High School, the old Jefferson where Robertsville is, and that was the first year for that junior high. We had two thousand students and there was six Physical Education teachers, three men, three women, and we had one gym.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, I bet that was a busy place.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, as long as the weather was good. I took that job and I came here in August and went through all the preliminary thing, the workshop at the first and everything and –
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for? Who was the principal then for Jefferson? Do you remember, offhand?
Ms. Gottshall: Mr. – oh, he was so nice. I can’t think what his name was.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, that’s okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Mr. Bonn was one of them. He was the Assistant Principal.
Mr. Kolb: Bonn? Bonn, B-O-N-N?
Ms. Gottshall: Bonn. He was here until he retired as principal. But the other one, I’ll think of his name, can’t think right now, but he was really, really nice. Well we had quite a few people and I taught 7th, 8th, and 9th grade just depending on what I was assigned, and when the weather got bad, we really had a problem, we had to have gym in the room and the 9th graders got to use the big gym. You know where Robertsville is; they’ve remodeled. Where the cafeteria is and the gym, that building has been added to some but it’s almost the same. Where the cafeteria is, that was the classroom. That was the old Robertsville School, and the 9th graders had their classes there. There were, I know Mrs. Marical was the Latin teacher and Mrs. Edwards was the English teacher and Mr. Clinton taught what they called Core and –
Mr. Kolb: Core?
Ms. Gottshall: Core, it was a combination of History and English.
Mr. Kolb: Oh the basic, okay, I see.
Ms. Gottshall: And Mr. Orlando was the physical education teacher.
Mr. Kolb: Nick Orlando?
Ms. Gottshall: Nick. He and I taught 9th grade in the big gym, if I had a 9th grade class. And Mr. Rice from up in East Tennessee was one of the men teachers, and he went back to around Kingsport the next year, I think, and Mr. Meffen came in and Mr. Stumiller came in, so those are the ones that taught there. There was another fellow that first year. He left, I think, when Mr. Rice did. The other gym teachers were Leola Hodge and Kathleen, well, she’s now Kathleen Shacter. Kathleen and Leola and I taught that first year.
Mr. Kolb: Is that John Shacter’s wife?
Ms. Gottshall: John Shacter’s.
Mr. Kolb: Wife?
Ms. Gottshall: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: She was Kathleen Williams and then she married Johnny, John, and she didn’t teach the next year and Pat Goode came in, so then it was Leola, me, and Pat. But that first year, when we didn’t have a gym – the gym hadn’t been built. Where the new gym, we called it – well, it was the new gym when they got it built, but now it’s the [old] gym because they’ve built another one. But we had to go to the classrooms, and a real funny thing happened. It wasn’t really funny when it happened, but I was in the classroom – I believe it was Mrs. Marical’s class. She taught 9th grade. She might have been teaching 8th then. She might have moved into the 9th grade later. But because she had this classroom and she did a lot of extra work – I know they were studying something about Italy and all that –
Mr. Kolb: Geography maybe?
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t think it was geography. I think it might have just been a classroom. But anyway, we were playing Bean Bag Toss in the classroom, and somebody threw the bean bag and knocked – she had on her desk this map with Sicily on it and Italy made out of that salt stuff, you know, combination. Somebody threw the beanbag and knocked Sicily off, and boy did that really upset me, because I knew she wasn’t going to be very happy about it. But finally, when they got the new gym, we did okay. We had two gyms, and –
Mr. Kolb: But you had two thousand students. That was a huge population. I mean, that’s bigger than the present day junior high.
Ms. Gottshall: No, it was about the same size.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: They were 7th, 8th, and 9th graders, and they were in classrooms. I really don’t know how many different individual classrooms. I know the 8th grade was in one section and 7th grade was back here. I can remember some of the teachers. There was a Miss Campbell and Mr. King.
Mr. Kolb: Boots Campbell?
Ms. Gottshall: Uh-huhn, she came about maybe two or three years after I did, but she taught 7th grade. And then there was, oh gosh, if I thought about it, I could name all of them I guess, but –
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, yeah, and I’m sure there’s a lot of turnover too, probably, in teachers.
Ms. Gottshall: No, surprisingly there wasn’t; teachers stayed.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get better pay here, you think, than other places?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, I know we did, yeah. We got better pay. I got more than I got in Etowah, and I got more than I got in Ohio, and Ohio was good.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Well it was over $200 a month, and that was pretty good, because when I first started teaching, I taught in Kentucky at Trigg County High School. I finished college in three and a half years and I was out in January, and so they were looking for teachers. See, that was the war, and teachers had left. They came up from Trigg County High School looking for an English teacher. I had minored in English, and I always liked English and Literature, and they needed a teacher down there, so I took that job for four months. But I decided then, I didn���t want to teach English because it was an awful lot of paper work, ’cause you had to grade every bit of homework, you did. And then when I went to Ohio, why – I told you what I taught there, and I minored in Biology and Physical Science, see, so I almost had a major in science. But since I had finished – if I had gone that next semester, I could have gotten a major in Science. But I’d been going to school and I thought I ought to work. But anyway, that first year, I got $85 a month at Freed County. Well, teachers didn’t make much then.
Mr. Kolb: No, but $200 is a lot more than $85.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, nobody made much, I mean, you know, salary range was down in everything. Well, then I went to Etowah and I made a hundred and, you know, I made more than $85. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was. Then I went to Ohio and I made more than I made in Etowah. But I came back from Ohio – even though my salary was going to be lower down here in Etowah, I came back into Tennessee because I didn’t like it in Ohio.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, the weather was a problem there. Well, let’s talk about then where you came here to live initially.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course, it was a real busy place. I mean the buses ran all night; the bus station was opened all night. They had city buses that went everywhere and I don’t really believe that I had to pay at first, that first year.
Mr. Kolb: Did you come by train?
Ms. Gottshall: I came by train.
Mr. Kolb: To where, Knoxville?
Ms. Gottshall: I came from Kentucky by train and I got off here at Elza Gate, and I believe they had some transportation for us. It wasn’t very far where we had to go for the office to be admitted. It was right inside Elza Gate where that liquor store is, somewhere right in there.
Mr. Kolb: To get processed and get your first badge.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes you had to get processed and get a badge and get assigned a place to live.
Mr. Kolb: So where did you go to live at first?
Ms. Gottshall: I lived at a new dormitory right there on the turnpike where the Red Cross building is. And they tore it down a couple years after.
Mr. Kolb: Where the new hospital building is, I guess.
Ms. Gottshall: No, it was directly across from where Tennessee Eastman was, right there on that corner where you turn up to go up to Tennessee. It was right there. And there I met a lot of – well a lot of teachers lived there. See, the housing – you couldn’t have a house – just a single individual couldn’t have a house. Now, there were some groups of people that got together and got houses. I don’t know how they did it because, actually, the houses were reserved for families that had certain jobs. I mean, you had to be sort of a permanent worker, and they didn’t consider teachers permanent, I believe. But anyway, I lived there in that dormitory that year. Then the next year I decided I’d move up to the one up near the old hospital, where the nurses stayed. You were here at the first, weren’t you?
Mr. Kolb: I lived in a dormitory in ��54 when I came here.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, you know those dormitories. The one I lived in down here was not like those others. Those first dormitories were probably a little bit nicer. But anyway, I got in a room up there.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have to share a room?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, you had to share a room. I guess you could have had a single. I don’t think you could’ve had a single room right at first. I never thought of [a] single room because they just assigned me to a room, and I had one bed and it had another one over here that somebody else was in it. But I had been teaching a year here and I met Margaret Bruner who taught out at my school, out at Jefferson, and she knew, she had been here the year before, and she had lived in a dormitory out there where the Garden Apartments are now and she knew some other teachers. Well, she asked me if I would like to move into an apartment with Margaret and Margaret and Margaret. Margaret Grills, Margaret Bruner, and Margaret Gottshall. By that time, the building was pretty much over, and a lot of people had moved out, and they had converted some dormitories out on Jefferson Circle to apartments, and so we got one of those apartments, and the three of us lived out there.
Mr. Kolb: Near Jefferson Circle?
Ms. Gottshall: On Jefferson Circle where those houses are, the houses they built out there. I’ve tried to remember exactly which driveway was ours. I don’t think they changed the driveways. But Margaret and Margaret and I lived out there for one year and then Margaret Bruner decided that she would go back to school, so she went to Chicago to be a church counselor or something, and so another teacher moved in with us, with Margaret Grills and me, Eloise Dempsey. Her father had been one of the very first people here with the engineer works. He was from New York and originally from South Carolina. He had been in the Army and he was the Truant Officer here. They lived up on Kentucky, right across from where the high school was. Eloise didn’t want to live at home; she’d finished college, so she wanted to live out. So she taught at Jefferson; she taught math. Margaret and I asked her if she wanted to move in our apartment with us, ’cause we’d lost Margaret Bruner, and she did, so we lived there, the three of us. Then we moved to the Brick Apartments when they were finished.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that, in the Brick Apartments?
Ms. Gottshall: Let me think.
Mr. Kolb: In the fifties, wasn’t it?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah it was in the fifties, ’cause I just lived there one – let’s see, I came in ’45 and I lived on Jefferson Circle, ’45, ’46, ’47, I guess, so I think the Brick Apartments had just been completed, ’cause I don’t believe anyone had lived where we moved. We lived at 248 North Purdue, the three of us, and we lived there for a while and then we decided we would move to the Garden Apartments. So the three of us moved to the Garden Apartments and we lived there for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: Was that when they first were opened up, too?
Ms. Gottshall: No, they had already been opened. See, I didn’t have a car and so I didn’t know much about Oak Ridge except what I knew getting on the bus in front of my dormitory that first year and riding out and getting off the bus out on the turnpike and walking through to the school over there, and I probably got off on Robertsville sometime too, because it was there. You know it was really funny, I – well I did get a ride lots of times. I knew a Mr. Jones and Kathleen Parker, and we’d lots of times get a ride to a certain place, you know, in the car, because Mr. Jones had a car.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, he worked at the Jefferson School?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, he was a ninth grade teacher, yeah. Kathleen was a seventh grade teacher.
Mr. Kolb: So you had to depend on the bus service until when? When did you get a car?
Ms. Gottshall: I finally got a car in – oh, I didn’t get a car until fifty – I think it was – well, I bought my sister’s car, secondhand car. It had a hundred thousand miles on it. It was a little roadster, but my brother-in-law – she was the one that lived in Somerset – he was real good with keeping the car in good shape, so it was a pretty good car. But I don’t think I had a car until around ’52, and I really didn’t know how to drive. I hadn’t driven because daddy didn’t teach me how to drive. He taught Katherine, but he didn’t teach me, and I went with him when he was teaching Katherine, and I decided I didn’t want him to teach me how to drive. But anyway, Nick Orlando taught me to drive.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, well that’s good.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, I can remember they were doing Drivers Ed then, and I got to – he taught me, and then he took me for the test and I passed it, and I got this car from my sister, and from then on I could go home in my own car. I usually got a ride with somebody from Kentucky: Marie Hines – she lived in Somerset, and then, the first year, Helen Caldwell was from Burnside, and I rode up with her some to Kentucky. Usually rode the bus.
Mr. Kolb: Now, talking about the local buses, did you ever get to ride on what they called cattle cars, those kind of rough buses that were real hard?
Ms. Gottshall: You mean where they just sat along the side?
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, those were mainly for plant people. I didn’t have to ride them because the city buses ��� that’s all I rode, the city buses. And like I say, I think at first it was free, and then it was a nickel, and then it became a dime. And it was really convenient to have the buses. That first year I lived up there, the bus station was right up here. That thing was open all night long. I mean there was just something going on all the time. You know where the filling station and the mortuary is? Okay, that was the Farmer’s Market, and I could walk up there from my dormitory. It was not buildings, as I recall; it was just tents. It was a wooden structure, I guess, with canvas put over it all the way up there, and they had good things, you know, they had fruit and vegetables.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Ms. Gottshall: And that’s where the market was, called the Farmer’s Market. And then right up the street was a real good eating place, really, oh gosh, why can’t I remember the names of those places? I didn’t think I’d ever forget them.
Mr. Kolb: On the Turnpike this was?
Ms. Gottshall: It was on the Turnpike right where the hospital is and there was an eating place there. Do you remember that?
Mr. Kolb: Snow White?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I had my first meal in Oak Ridge at the Snow White.
Ms. Gottshall: Snow White. I used to walk up there and eat at the Snow White, and I ate at the cafeteria. Mainly I ate at the cafeteria. We’d walk over to the cafeteria. It wasn’t very far from where I lived.
Mr. Kolb: They called it Central Cafeteria?
Ms. Gottshall: Central Cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: When I came here, I think it was called the T&C; I think Capiellos bought that some way.
Ms. Gottshall: It might have been called the T&C then, that first year that I was here, but I just think of it as the Central Cafeteria. I’ve got some chairs from that. You know where those chairs came from?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Ms. Gottshall: They came from Virginia from the Army Corps. They must have been from World War I, weren’t they? You know, those chairs you sat on up there, they’re Bentwood chairs.
Mr. Kolb: They could be, yeah, well made.
Ms. Gottshall: I got some of them.
Mr. Kolb: You bought them on surplus later on?
Ms. Gottshall: I bought them when they had some sellouts, and they’re not real comfortable to sit on.
Mr. Kolb: But they last; they’re sturdy. So you didn’t have a car. You got around on the bus. Where did you do your shopping? Up at Central Townsite?
Ms. Gottshall: I was near Jackson Square and I can remember standing in line to buy hose up at, let’s see, what was the name of that store?
Mr. Kolb: Loveman’s?
Ms. Gottshall: Taylor’s. There was a – right there, where those office buildings are, do you remember that store there?
Mr. Kolb: Well, there used to be Loveman’s there and then the bowling alley.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, Taylor’s was before Loveman’s. And then in the corner up there, up Jackson Square, there was a grocery store there. Was that the A&P? Do you remember?
Mr. Kolb: It was gone when I got here in ’54, so I don’t know.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, you didn’t come till ’54. Well I’m almost sure that that was a grocery store up there. I know it was a grocery store, ’cause at that time I smoked. Of course I quit later on, not too much later on, but I stood in line to buy cigarettes up there. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Now rationing was over then, when you got here after the war?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, but cigarettes were scarce because they were sending them all overseas. You know, I told you I was in Louisville the day that the war ended. I remember that. We went downtown. Katherine and Paul lived in a place called Inn Castle ’cause he was with the office of Corps of Engineers in Louisville at that time, ’cause they moved him around different places when they were building dams. He was in the land acquisition. We were downtown. I can remember all the people hollering and throwing stuff around the day the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: Did they say anything about Oak Ridge at that time? Had you heard about Oak Ridge being involved in the war?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course you did, because they dropped the bomb. My brother-in-law didn’t even know what they were buying this land for. He said, “You don’t even try to guess what they are building it for.” They were very, very strict. In fact, if they caught you making – see, I was here after the war, but before the war, if you made some statement like, “What are they doing here?” and stuff like that, they dismissed them, I understand. Now, of course, I wasn’t here, so I don’t know it firsthand, but I thought I had always heard that. Well, he told Katherine and me that you didn’t even talk about what they were doing over there; nobody did.
Mr. Kolb: And if you did, you got moved?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course, we were still restricted after the war.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh yeah. I had to have a badge to get in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, but you had a badge of course, yeah, sure.
Ms. Gottshall: And even to get into town.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Ms. Gottshall: And that went on, of course, for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: Till ’49 when the gates came down?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. ’Cause I know one time I was invited to go to Knoxville and play bridge, and there were three or four of us, and we got on the bus; we had to ride the bus then to Knoxville. We went over there to the – I think it was the Country Club.
Mr. Kolb: Deane Hill?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I don’t remember exactly where it was ’cause I wasn’t familiar with any of it. Well anyway, when I got on the bus, I discovered I hadn’t picked up my badge. See, I didn’t have to have my badge when I was just going to school. Now, if you’d worked at the plant, you had to wear your badge all the time, but I really didn’t have to show my badge.
Mr. Kolb: Except when you went out.
Ms. Gottshall: When I went out and wanted back in. So I was on the bus and the man got on the bus to check the badges. They checked them going out, but they weren’t real careful going out.
Mr. Kolb: So you slipped out without one.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, no, I had a badge then. This woman standing next to me had her work badge and her residence badge, so she said, “You can show him this one.” So I showed him that badge. And when I came in that night I didn’t have a badge, so I had to get off at the gate. I can’t even remember what gate we came in, but it must have been Elza Gate. Anyway, when we got to the gate, the guard got on to check all the badges and I said, “I don’t have mine, I must have forgotten it.” And he didn’t say, “How did you get out?” He just said, “Get off.” So I got off the bus and I went in the guard shed and he said, “Well, you’ll have to get somebody to get you in.” At that time, I think, I must have been in Jefferson Circle. But anyway, I called, and somebody – we didn��t lock our doors then. Nobody locked their doors. All the doors were left undone. So I called somebody, and they went in, and my badge was lying on the dresser, and they had a car and they came out and –
Mr. Kolb: They brought it to you.
Ms. Gottshall: Brought me the badge.
Mr. Kolb: Boy, you were lucky.
Ms. Gottshall: Yep.
Mr. Kolb: You were lucky, yeah. That’s interesting.
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t know what they would have done with me if I hadn’t have [had it] – but they knew I was a resident.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but they had to have that badge. Now was that the Army still checking on you when you came in at Elza Gate?
Ms. Gottshall: I guess it was. Yeah the Army was here for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: What other kind of living conditions did you have to put up with?
Ms. Gottshall: People talk about the mud, but I don’t – now, I came in ’45 and we didn’t really have any sidewalks, but I don’t remember mud. We had wooden things to walk on.
Mr. Kolb: Boardwalks. You were not on some of the side streets going up the ridge; you were more around the turnpike.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, I was just going to Turnpike, and I wasn’t living up in the houses. This neighbor of mine told me that – they were here really early – they could put up a house in a day.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Ms. Gottshall: And they’d go to work and come back and there would be a whole bunch more on the street.
Mr. Kolb: So much change, yeah. Well, you did have to put up with a lot of hassle, though, from the military and all the shortages of everything under the sun.
Ms. Gottshall: Of course, I wasn’t keeping a house, so I didn’t realize that. I was eating out at restaurants and things.
Mr. Kolb: You ate out most of the time until you got an apartment, in the brick apartments, I guess you’d say.
Ms. Gottshall: Well in the apartment, we never did go to Knoxville to buy groceries. We had the Farmer’s Market and then there were some stores here by then. At first, they didn’t have anything, I’m pretty sure.
Mr. Kolb: But did you go to Knoxville to shop for other things much?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, when you did much shopping you went, but I didn’t go much. I didn’t have any way to get there except on the bus.
Mr. Kolb: The buses still ran. Did you think the Knoxville people treated you okay as far as you know? Or were you looked at [as] being different, being from Oak Ridge?
Ms. Gottshall: You could tell a difference in teaching. We had to go to the East Tennessee Teachers Meeting, and that was in Knoxville every fall in October, and it was really funny when you’d have discussion in a group. You know, you had to tell your name and where you were from, and boy when you said Oak Ridge, people just thought, well, another one of those –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, one of those whatever.
Ms. Gottshall: They really were – they weren’t rude or anything, but you could sense that. Well they knew, I’m sure, that we had a lot of advantages that a lot of the schools didn’t have. I know we did, ’cause we had money. The schools had money. You could get equipment, you could get supplies, and I’m sure that they resented the ones –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a little jealously there.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, and of course there were teachers here from everywhere, I mean everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, so they weren’t locals like the rest of the people were.
Ms. Gottshall: No, they weren’t locals. Well, some of them were.
Mr. Kolb: But not all, right.
Ms. Gottshall: Not all together, because they went everywhere to find teachers. You know they were desperate if they wire me with [a job offer] – I never saw the superintendent until the day we had the picnic, the watermelon cutting up behind the Chapel on the Hill. See, I had turned down the one offer and then I applied again, and then they just wired and said I had been assigned to Jefferson Junior High School and I never saw him, Dr. Blankenship, until the day we had the picnic.
Mr. Kolb: I see, at the end of the first year?
Ms. Gottshall: No, the picnic was that year.
Mr. Kolb: Summertime?
Ms. Gottshall: When I got there. It was in September.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, okay.
Ms. Gottshall: We had sort of a picnic.
Mr. Kolb: To start off.
Ms. Gottshall: I think it was after Workshop one day or something. We had what they called ‘Workshop’ and it cut that down a lot. We used to have to meet two weeks before school and two weeks after school. The two weeks before school, that was preparing for school, and the two weeks after, that was completing everything.
Mr. Kolb: And you got paid for that, of course.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes, we got ten months’ pay, and that’s why we got the ten months’ pay, because we had Workshop. You see, Oak Ridge has always – I don’t remember whether they still do or not, but we always went to school longer than anybody else in Tennessee.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: There are a certain number of days required, but we did more.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, then you had that extra time added on too. But you did think the other teachers kind of looked at you with envy, maybe, a little bit?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, yeah, they weren’t really happy with our ideas, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, even the ideas.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, you know, when you – and like I say, there were teachers from a lot of places and they had different ideas.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s probably true, not the traditional way of doing things.
Ms. Gottshall: No, but I don’t think anybody was ever mean to anybody.
Mr. Kolb: No, but just different, yeah.
Ms. Gottshall: They just, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Oak Ridgers were different.
Ms. Gottshall: And eventually Oak Ridge teachers got in positions of leadership in East Tennessee and in the state. They eventually accepted Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that’s the way it is now, that’s right. But it took a long time, I’m sure. Well, let’s talk about some of the activities you did for fun and enjoyment when you were here, like the recreational activities. You taught during the daytime, but you didn’t teach all night. You didn’t have that homework like you said you didn’t want to have.
Ms. Gottshall: No. Now, in physical education, we did give tests, written tests; the women did. The men didn’t always give them, but the women did. I did have to grade papers in physical education. I didn’t in Etowah.
Mr. Kolb: But that’s not recreation.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, we had a show; we had a movie here. This was sometime after I’d been here, I guess, five years. Well, I was teaching, I was volunteering to teach Red Cross class in – oh, it wasn’t Red Cross. What was it? I had an exercise group at the high school and townspeople could come in. Well this woman that was in the group said was I interested in going on up in the Smokies, you know, to the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club, and I said yeah, I would like to. She was a member; her name was Phyllis Brown at the time. So she invited me to go up in the cabin in the Greenbrier. The club doesn’t have it any longer, but they used to have it. And so we were going up there, and that was the first time I’d ever gone. Even though I’m from Kentucky, I wasn’t familiar with mountains. I lived down south of Lexington, and that’s the foothills and the hills, but it’s not mountains. And I had gone to the Smokies, to Gatlinburg, with some teachers one Sunday, and I think it was the guidance counselor at the junior high. She invited me, and her name was – was that Margaret Barnes? I think it was. She’s not here anymore. She invited about four or five of us to go to Gatlinburg and eat. That used to be one of the big things.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s a hotel there?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Mountain View?
Ms. Gottshall: Mountain View. There were three that were real good.
Mr. Kolb: Oh okay, I remember the Mountain View.
Ms. Gottshall: They��re gone now.
[Side B]
Ms. Gottshall: When she and I used to go to have lunch up there, we went up to Gatlinburg, and I just couldn’t believe the hills.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. You’d never seen mountains like that?
Ms. Gottshall: I had never seen mountains like that. If I had, it didn’t make that much impression on me, because it was really good. Going to Gatlinburg was not like it is now. You had to go up and around a little bitty narrow road up around where Pigeon Forge is. They made that road like that. We used to go up around that hill someway, and that was really exciting to see the mountain.
Mr. Kolb: For the first time, yeah.
Ms. Gottshall: And then Phyllis invited me to go to this [Smoky Mountain] Hiking Club meet at the cabin. They were going to spend the night, and I think I borrowed some things, something to sleep in, a sleeping bag, and a pack, and there were going to be quite a few up there. We used to meet up there and sleep. They had two cabins. This Hiking Club had built it. See that Hiking Club is real old; it started 1926. On the way up there, we passed a little boy. Phyllis had been in the Hiking Club for about a year or maybe more and we passed this boy that she knew was in the Hiking Club. He was hitchhiking up to the Smokies, so we picked him up and took him on up there, and we were the first ones there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, beat everybody else there.
Ms. Gottshall: No, wasn’t anybody else there. It was early in the afternoon, and other people were going to get up there after work. So we went out to the cook shed and cooked our meal, and then we went in the lower cabin and built a big fire and were sitting there, you know, waiting for the other people to come. Now this was in the fall, and it was cool up there, so we were sitting there with the door closed, and all of a sudden we heard this scratching on the door. Of course, I had never heard anything about bears or anything, so Phyllis said, “Gosh that sounds like a bear.” And this boy was about fifteen and we were real excited about the bear.
Mr. Kolb: There was a bear?
Ms. Gottshall: And it kept going like that. So they had some tools in there. Well I picked up this axe and I thought, well, if he knocks the door in, I’ll just hit him in the head. Well he just kept on scratching. We decided to go upstairs; there was a loft. So we went upstairs to the loft and there were some shingles up there they had, so we kept throwing shingles out between the thing to try to scare him off.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. You could see him?
Ms. Gottshall: No, you couldn’t see out there, but you could hear him. So then he went around to the other door and scratched. Then we heard people coming. We could hear them way down at the creek, where they had to cross the creek, and so we went back downstairs. We were all excited because of this bear, and on the door you could see these marks. Well, they said they didn’t see any bear around when they came up. So we slept in sleeping bags, and there was crowd down here in this cabin and a crowd up there in that cabin. There were two cabins there. They were sort of joined. They had brought them down from somewhere. They were real old cabins. The next morning, I was lying in my sleeping bag in there and these two men were standing up at the fireplace talking, and this one man said, “I just tore my fingernails all to pieces last night.” These two men were out there teasing, you know, making like a bear at the door.
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t a bear after all?
Ms. Gottshall: No it wasn’t a bear.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sakes.
Ms. Gottshall: It was a man from Nashville and a man that lived over in Knoxville, and they thought they’d just tease us, and they said they just rolled on the ground out there. Well then I realized.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you said there was a bear outside.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, we thought it was bear and they just had the –
Mr. Kolb: The biggest old laugh, but you heard them talking about it.
Ms. Gottshall: But I heard them talking about it. They didn’t know I was still there I guess.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the secret was out. Oh, my.
Ms. Gottshall: But I’ve been in the Hiking Club now since 1953, well, ’52 really. Of course, I can’t hike anymore, but I used to hike. I used to hike every other weekend after I got in it from ’52 on until about ’82. I hiked about every other weekend, and that’s what I did for recreation.
Mr. Kolb: Did you join a church when you came here?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh yeah, I’d already belonged to the church. I joined the church in Munfordville, Kentucky when I was twelve, and so I just moved my membership down here to Trinity.
Mr. Kolb: Methodist church?
Ms. Gottshall: Methodist. When we lived on Jefferson Circle, I believe there was a bowling alley out there, right above that drug store.
Mr. Kolb: I believe there was. I never saw it.
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t know whether it was a bowling alley or just a sports –
Mr. Kolb: A recreation hall?
Ms. Gottshall: Recreation, it was just a recreation hall. It wasn’t a bowling alley. It was the recreation hall for that section. You know, there were recreation halls in every different section.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, like this one here. This is a rec hall.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. Of course, when it became the Wildcat Den, it was just for kids. I used to chaperone here when I taught at the high school.
Mr. Kolb: But there was bowling.
Ms. Gottshall: No, that was a recreation hall out there, where we had church, and then they built that church up there where it is now. When I moved up to the Brick Apartments, I changed my membership and moved it up to First Church because I could walk to the church. At that time, when I moved to the Brick Apartments, I got a car. That’s when I got that car.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so you could get around pretty good then.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. But I didn’t get it right at first, and then when I moved to the Garden Apartments, I did have a car. I got a new car. I just kept that first car one year, and then I bought me a new Oldsmobile, when I lived in the Garden Apartments.
Mr. Kolb: But there were a lot of opportunities for recreation here that probably most towns didn’t have, right, like the Playhouse and things like that?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. Well, the Playhouse wasn’t where it is now.
Mr. Kolb: No, I know but, I mean –
Ms. Gottshall: It was a movie theater. We went to the movie theater. There was a movie – let’s see – oh, I went to the museum out there, you know, the science museum. It was out where that cafeteria used to be out at Jefferson Circle. That was the first museum. That’s where I went at the first. That’s when I first went to the museum and I got one of those dimes that they –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, irradiated –
Ms. Gottshall: Radiated dimes.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t that open the day that the city opened in ’49? I heard that that’s when the museum opened first.
Ms. Gottshall: I know it was there when I lived in Goldsboro. That was the name of the – Goldsboro Apartments – that’s the name of the –
Mr. Kolb: At Jefferson.
Ms. Gottshall: At Jefferson, Goldsboro. It finally came to me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good, I never knew that. They’re gone now of course, unfortunately. So there was plenty to do here as a single person and kept you busy. But after the war, I guess the security issue sort of went away gradually. I mean, you had to have your badge to get in and out.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, you know, when they took the gates down – oh, the day they took the gates, they opened – I was –
Mr. Kolb: You were here then?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I went on the bus out to Solway Bridge, to that gate out there, somewhere out there, and got on the bus and rode a city bus out, and I got on the bus that was bringing those people in that were here to celebrate the opening of the gates.
Mr. Kolb: The notary –
Ms. Gottshall: They asked for volunteers. So I volunteered to go out to – and I don’t remember too much about that. I know –
Mr. Kolb: Did you march in the parade they had?
Ms. Gottshall: No, I didn’t march in the parade, but I watched the parade. I’m not very much for marching in parades.
Mr. Kolb: I just wondered.
Ms. Gottshall: Or riding on things.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I heard they had a representative of every state in the union, practically.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, yeah, and a man was here on the horse, and there was a movie star here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, several movie stars. Marie MacDonald was one of them.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. It was very exciting.
Mr. Kolb: And Alvin Barkley, Senator Barkley, I think, was here.
Ms. Gottshall: For the gates to open.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right. A lot of speeches, and I understood the townspeople initially didn’t want the gates to go away. They wanted to keep the gates up so they could keep their doors unlocked and have the security of having everyone –
Ms. Gottshall: Well, it was nice to not have to worry.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, not have to worry about that.
Ms. Gottshall: I know my brother came to see me when I lived – now, even after the gates went down, we didn’t necessarily lock our doors, because we were so used to – but my brother came to see me and I wasn’t at home. Well, they walked up to the door, you know, and he tried it and it was open, and they just went on in. He jumped all over me. He said, “Margaret, you ought to have more sense than to go off and leave your house opened.”
Mr. Kolb: So did you start locking your door then?
Ms. Gottshall: I doubt it. We did eventually. I know we did eventually because one night out at the Garden Apartments we got home and the door was locked and we didn’t have the key and there was three of us living there. So we managed to get the kitchen window up, and I climbed in the window since I was probably the most active one of the bunch. The others were all young but they weren’t real active. So I climbed in the window and opened the door so we could get in.
Mr. Kolb: Found a way. Well let me ask you one thing. This may not strike you as being important, but did you have much contact with the Afro-Americans in town early on when you came?
Ms. Gottshall: I didn’t really have – well, let me think – it was in college. We had a maid at Western that I really – she was so nice, you know. I had never in my whole life really been associated with Afro-Americans, because even though I lived in little towns, and they were in the population, you know –
Mr. Kolb: And the schools were segregated back then, so you didn’t have any black –
Ms. Gottshall: The schools were segregated. In Somerset, they had a school and we had a school. I went to high school in Somerset, Kentucky. We had moved to different places, but I went back there and went to high school and lived with my sister.
Mr. Kolb: But they were segregated there too, of course.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, so I really hadn’t had any contact.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anybody on the staff at Jefferson Junior High that was, like custodians?
Ms. Gottshall: No, I don’t believe we had. We had none until I got to the high school. I remember when segregation stopped. It was very unusual, you know, and I had some students, black students, that were very good. In fact, even though I grew up in the south, I really never had prejudice about it. I didn’t know them. But like I say, there was a maid at college, and she was so nice. I worked at the library and she was a maid at the library, you know, real nice person and I really enjoyed her. And then when I got them in school, it was different, and of course our high school was so different. We didn’t have a lot of feeling. We did have some sit ins, sit downs at the high schools.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Before it was desegregated?
Ms. Gottshall: After we had the black students. I can remember them sitting down in the lobby. I don’t know what brought it on.
Mr. Kolb: They were protesting something, you mean.
Ms. Gottshall: I guess they just weren’t happy. I know one time, we did have – at that big elm tree out there down by the gym – I went to school one morning and they had hanged a thing on it. That was taken down, and nothing was made of it. We really did not have the prejudice that you found in the other schools around here. Clinton, you know, they bombed the school. I can remember when integration first started. Ben Martin was the coach, the basketball coach.
Mr. Kolb: Coached everything, didn’t he?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, at first he did, but when I got here, he was not coaching everything. He was the basketball coach, and we had football coaches and track coaches for the boys. The girls didn’t have any until 1976. Girls had nothing. We didn’t even have a basketball team until ’76 because the – I don’t know what the reason was. Apparently, the administration just was not in favor of girls athletics. Now, we did everything in school. I mean, we played basketball. We really had a good program of physical education at this high school when they were having it. They don’t have physical education now, but we had everything. But anyway, I’ll go back to when the basketball team – we had black students on the basketball team, and there were schools that wouldn’t play us because we did. But Coach Martin was one of these people – he was very fair fellow, I mean he was a really good fellow. I liked him. He was from Kentucky. He went to the University of Kentucky.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s how the name Wildcat got associated with Oak Ridge High School I heard.
Ms. Gottshall: I really don’t know what town he was from in Kentucky, but I know he went to UK. He was a real physical education teacher plus a coach. It’s hard to get that combination sometimes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s right, and be good at it, and do it as long as he did.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. At first, in teaching, we didn’t have any girls sports; we had nothing except in gym class. Well, Mary Cooper and I used to get teams together. UT was very good about – and then there were a lot of church teams. The girls played in church teams. I used to get the stars from all the church teams and get them together to go and play at Chilhowee Park. They won the tournament. But I wasn’t a basketball coach; they won it in spite of me.
Mr. Kolb: But they didn’t know that, see.
Ms. Gottshall: But they knew how to play basketball. When UT used to have track meets – we were trying to get track introduced in Tennessee for girls. They had boys track for years, but they had no girls track. So they would have ‘play days,’ they called it. I’d always get a gang of kids together and go over there and be in the play day and we eventually –
Mr. Kolb: At UT?
Ms. Gottshall: At UT. And then I’d gone and done my masters at Peabody and I had a teacher over there – he’s the coach at – oh, David Lipscomb – so he was interested in track too. He was a swimming person but he also was interested in track because he had a daughter who liked track, I think. He called me and asked me if I could organize track here and have a meet, and he’d have one in middle Tennessee, and then West Tennessee didn’t have one right at first, but they did later on and pretty good. So I had the first regional track meet here. It wasn’t sanctioned yet – you know, it had to be – but we had a regional track meet and had a lot of them, a lot of kids here. Then the next year, Pat Goode was teaching at Karns, and she had it. The next year it became sanctioned in Tennessee. And we had girls track in ’76, and the same year they had basketball. Sue Darthavan coached the first basketball because she had played on a church team. She wasn’t born here, but she was one of my students back when I first started teaching. Then she went to college and came back and taught at the high school. So she coached the first basketball, and the same year that track was sanctioned, girls basketball was allowed to form here in Tennessee, in Oak Ridge. It was already sanctioned in the state.
Mr. Kolb: What teams did you play? Did you have teams around here to play right away?
Ms. Gottshall: On the track?
Mr. Kolb: No, basketball.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, she just went into the regular –
Mr. Kolb: I mean, other schools started up at the same time, and they had teams?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, they were already playing. Tennessee played basketball when I was at Etowah, ’cause I coached it. I mean, the girls played.
Mr. Kolb: Just Oak Ridge didn’t have it.
Ms. Gottshall: Just Oak Ridge didn’t have it. Then eventually they got all the things: soccer, softball, track, basketball for girls. Because they found out the girls were strong enough to do that, I guess; I don’t know why.
Mr. Kolb: Once they open the door wide, they came charging in.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, back when – now, I said Kentucky didn’t have basketball. They used to back when I was an eighth grader. They had teams in Kentucky, girls teams, ’cause I used to go – I mean, when we moved to Monticello, my brothers played basketball and my dad always went to the games. They played football, too, and he always went to those games. Well, I went with Daddy. I was six years old and they were in high school, and I’d go to the basketball games with Daddy, and the girls were playing, too, then. And Daddy always liked to go early because he liked to watch the girls games because they always got in fights. They’d roll on the floor and pull hair, as I remember. I was just six, you know, and I couldn’t figure. I wouldn’t sit with Dad; I’d go around with the kids. But I remember looking, and they’d go up to shoot foul shots, and I noticed that sometimes they’d take one shot and sometimes they’d take two. So I devised the idea that it was something about the numbers on the back of their uniforms that determined whether they got one or two.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you figured it out eventually. Right?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, yeah. I finally figured out how they got it.
Mr. Kolb: Fouled in the act of shooting, right? Well, what other unique experiences can you remember about your early days in Oak Ridge, Margaret? Anything stand out that was different or made it memorable? I’m sure you had a lot of experiences in the classroom that were kind of interesting or unique, but just in general.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, it was just so different from a regular town. Like [in] Somerset, you had [the] central part of town, you had stores, and of course, Oak Ridge wasn’t that way.
Mr. Kolb: All strung out. Different shopping centers.
Ms. Gottshall: That to me was – and, you know, I went through here one time. This was after I was teaching at Etowah, went through on the bus. The buses went through, but you couldn’t get off.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right? You mean, you came through on the state highway, down the turnpike basically?
Ms. Gottshall: But you couldn’t get off, because you weren’t a resident.
Mr. Kolb: That was during the war?
Ms. Gottshall: It must have been, because we went through here one time. I had to go home. I had a hard time getting to Elizabethtown, Kentucky from this part of Tennessee. I had to go to Knoxville and get on a bus and go up 27 to Somerset. After Mom and Daddy moved back there, it was not hard, but when I had to go to Elizabethtown – that’s where we lived when I first came here – I had a roundabout way to go. Sometimes I had to go to Nashville. If I wanted to go on the train – trains were still running then – I went to Clinton and got on the train and then I had to transfer. It was a very, very difficult way to get to – I had to get on the train at a place called Boston, Kentucky, which was outside of Elizabethtown.
Mr. Kolb: And then transfer there?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well Oak Ridge had a lot of younger people.
Ms. Gottshall: Oak Ridge was isolated, really. Of course, they picked it for that reason.
Mr. Kolb: But it was so busy, so many people here. Even after the war, there was a lot of people here.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, what year was that? It was 1949, I guess. You know, when I came there was seventy thousand people. Well, it was about three or four years after I came that, wham, you know, it went down. Tennessee Eastman moved out, and the construction – all of that moved out, and I remember when I came where downtown is was all trailers.
Mr. Kolb: And hutments.
Ms. Gottshall: It was trailers.
Mr. Kolb: Just trailers? Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Hutments were way out on the turnpike. I didn’t see many of them because I didn’t have any way to get out there, but I knew they were out there, and where the high school is now was trailers. All of that was trailers. There were flattops on Hamilton Circle right off of Hillside. I remember when they moved the trailers out, over here at downtown there wasn’t anything there, and when it got dry that dirt would just blow and we used to call it the Great Oak Ridge Desert, because it was really very dusty. We’d have dust storms when it would blow, and then they built downtown. That was in ’54, wasn’t it?
Mr. Kolb: I came in ’54, just after that, because there was still so few shopping – there still was a shopping center there, Midtown Shopping Center was there, and they knocked that down to make the original shopping center.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, there was a Bruner’s store right off the turnpike there where you go into Downtown.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, right there where the – you remember the Da Wabbit?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, vaguely.
Ms. Gottshall: The Da Wabbit was there. That was one of the main places to go get something to eat and to tour around, you know, drive around the Da Wabbit. Of course, that was high school kids. Well, it wasn’t high school kids mainly, either, because high school kids didn’t have cars then.
Mr. Kolb: It was younger people, looking for a date.
Ms. Gottshall: Of course, later on they got cars, but they didn’t have a lot of cars in ’54.
Mr. Kolb: That was a different time wasn’t it? A lot of things have stayed the same; a lot of things have changed.
Ms. Gottshall: Now, I started to tell you – you know, I said I went through here on the bus and I looked out. I thought, well, boy, this is one place I sure hope I don’t ever have to live.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? And two years later you were here.
Ms. Gottshall: It’s funny what statements we make. I know I used to say when I was in high school, “Well, there’s one thing I’ll never be. I’ll never be a teacher. Teacher is the last thing I’ll ever be.”
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I wanted to be a nurse and Mom didn’t want me to be a nurse. So I went to a teachers’ college, ended up being a teacher, and teaching was the very last thing I ever did, for forty-four years.
Mr. Kolb: You taught forty-four years?
Ms. Gottshall: I taught forty-four years and four months and nine weeks.
Mr. Kolb: And how many minutes?
Ms. Gottshall: Well I count it like that because one summer – this was in 1949, I believe – I went home. The first summer I was here, I worked on the playground. That was a unique experience. They used to have playgrounds in all the schools. They still do, I think. But it was different. You went out and stayed all day at the playground and they had –
Mr. Kolb: Now this was working for the city?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, Recreation Department, and you took care of the kids all day long. You were sort of a paid babysitter for the City and I know I was at Glenwood, the old Glenwood and I can still remember a girl I had out there, Ellen Sherwood. Now why I remember her I don’t know, but she came every day to the playground. She did artwork, you know, she liked to draw. She was a kid about twelve, something like that. Anyway, at the playground you had a softball team; you had to organize a softball team. Well, I had lots of little boys, no girls, just boys on the softball team. I organized my team, and then we’d get on the bus and we’d go to different schools and play them. I just worked the playground one summer.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of a busy life, wasn’t it?
Ms. Gottshall: I decided I’d go home in the summer. So one summer, went home. The next summer, I went home and I looked for a job and I went to this factory where they made clothes. I thought, well, I could, for nine weeks I could. I didn’t even know how to work a machine, but I thought they could tell me. But he didn’t want to hire me for nine weeks because he’d have to train me, and if I was only going to stay nine weeks, he didn’t want to fool with it. So I thought, well, I’ll just go where I know what I’m doing. So I went to the school superintendent and he said, “Yes, I’ll hire you.” He said, “I’ve got a country school.” Kentucky still had country schools then, one room school, and this teacher was going to UK to finish her degree. So he said, “I’ve got a school down at Hardin Springs that I need a teacher for,” and so I said, well, I’d take it. I didn’t have a car then, but my sister was there, the one that was married to the Corps of Engineer fellow. He was in Louisville but they couldn’t find an apartment for children, that would take children. They had two little children, so she had to come home and he lived in a hotel, I think. But they couldn’t find any place to live, so she was at home that summer, so she took me down. It was twenty-five miles from Elizabethtown and it was on a gravel road and it had a mill and a grocery store and a post office and a few houses scattered. I had twenty-three kids in school in a one room school, and when we got down there, Mom said, “Well you can’t stay here.” I said, “Well I sure will because I’ve already told the man I would do it.” So I stayed and taught them.
Mr. Kolb: Now where did you live?
Ms. Gottshall: I lived at a home.
Mr. Kolb: With a family?
Ms. Gottshall: They had two kids and I had a room there and then I walked to school. She fixed me a lunch. That was a really nice – I enjoyed that. I taught kids to read and I didn’t even know the first thing about it because I didn’t do elementary education – see, I was secondary. But they were really nice kids.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you had an interesting career Margaret, I must say. You’ve come a long way in those years. Okay, I guess that will do it and I thank you very much. Okay?
Ms. Gottshall: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MARGARET GOTTSHALL
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
April 10, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay Margaret let’s begin by asking you first when and why you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Ms. Gottshall: Okay, I came in August. I think it was August the 23rd I got here, 1945, and I came because I was given a job teaching school. I had been here in the summer of ’43. My brother-in-law was Assistant Project Manager with the Corps of Engineers and he was in Harriman, he and his wife lived in Harriman, and so I came to visit them when school was out in Ohio. I had been teaching in Ohio, so I came here to visit them for the summer, and Paul brought me over here just to see Oak Ridge. And, of course, it wasn’t like it is now. I remember a great big long line from that Central Cafeteria in Townsite, and he told me that was people going in to eat lunch, and we stopped in front of the Tennessee Eastman Building because that’s where his business – that’s where he had to go to talk to someone. His office wasn’t here. He spent most of his time in, I think, Knoxville at the court, because there were land acquisitions, and they had gotten this land, and they had several lawsuits about the land.
Mr. Kolb: He was in the Corps of Engineers you say?
Ms. Gottshall: He was from the Corps of Engineers. He was just the Assistant Project Manager. Their office was in Harriman and he would go into Knoxville most times, but sometimes he had to come into Oak Ridge to see some of the people. So while I was sitting there – now this was in ’43 – while I was sitting there, I thought, well gosh, I don’t want to just sit there. Well, I didn’t have a pass to do anything else, but I was right in front of the employment office, so I went in and I thought, well I’ll just go in and apply for a job. I had a job in Ohio because I had signed another contract to teach the next year, but I really didn’t want to go back up there; it was too cold. But I had signed a contract, so I went in and I did what you do to apply for a job, and boy were they eager, they were really eager to hire people. Well, they started me on my, you know, whatever they do when they’re hiring you, and they told me to come back the next day. Well when I got out, and when Paul and I left, I said could he bring me over again the next day and he said, “Why, sure, I can bring you over.” So I did come over the next day and finish that up, but meanwhile, someone had been in his office. He was recruiting teachers and he was from Etowah, Tennessee, or from Athens, from that county down there. He had come in there and was just talking and he was looking for teachers and Paul said, “I know a teacher, but I think she’s got a job.” And so Paul told me that night and I said, “Well, tell him if he comes in there again that maybe I’d be interested in his teaching,” ’cause I really didn’t like it in Ohio, even though my dad was from Ohio and I had been there for summers all my life; we’d gone up to visit my grandparents. So I told him, he talked to the man, the man did come and see me, and I said, “Well, if I can get released from my contract in Ohio, I would like the job.” It was at Etowah. It was in Etowah, Tennessee, teaching Physical Education, and that’s what I majored in, but in Ohio, I taught very little Physical Education. I taught General Science and Biology and Geography and, you know, whatever they had left over, they always give to a new teacher. And so I wrote to the superintendent in Ohio and asked to be released, and he wrote me back. It had been about a week or more, and he wrote me back and said, well, since I was going to work for the government, he would release me. Oak Ridge had already investigated me, see, and he thought I was going to work for the government, and so I didn’t tell him I was going to teach school in another place, but, well, he didn’t ask me, he just assumed I was going to work for the government. Well, I didn’t even know I had a job with the government yet, you know. So I took the job at Etowah, and I was there two years, and I’d got the job up here too. After I got to Etowah, they called and wanted me to come, but it wasn’t teaching, see, because the schools didn’t open until October.
Mr. Kolb: I see, of ’43?
Ms. Gottshall: Uh-huhn. They might have been looking for teachers, but that wasn’t what I applied for. I don’t know what I was going to do. And so I just called them back and told them that I was employed and I didn’t want the job up here. So I stayed in Etowah two years, and meanwhile I met some people who were teaching school up here, and so I applied at the end of that first year. Well, wait a minute, I can’t remember when I wrote for an application, but I wrote up here for an application and I got one and I sent it in, and meanwhile I was teaching my second year at Etowah. Well, they called me and wanted me to come up here, but I was already teaching down there, the second year, so I didn’t think it was fair to leave them without a teacher and to come up here, so I told them I wasn’t interested anymore up here. So I taught a year in Etowah and I was coaching basketball. Well, I’d really never played basketball except in a gym class, ’cause they didn’t play it in Kentucky. We didn’t have girls basketball, you know, varsity basketball in Kentucky then.
Mr. Kolb: Probably didn’t here in Tennessee either.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes they did. They had basketball in Tennessee for girls a long time. I coached the girls team at Etowah, and I really had to work pretty hard. I don’t guess I was too good a coach, but I coached it for two years. I didn’t know I had it when I went down there. They didn’t tell me I had to coach the girls and do boys and girls in gym, but I enjoyed the gym part. The boys were really good because they loved to do things. The girls okay, but anyway, I had been coaching for two years and I asked for a supplement for coaching basketball and they didn’t give the girls a supplement. They gave the man a supplement, but they didn’t give the woman a supplement. I don’t know, maybe ’cause I was teaching gym, they figured I was getting enough. But anyway, they wouldn’t give me the supplement. So that was at the end of ’45, I mean, at the end of the school year, and that summer I went to Louisville. My sister and her husband were up there, and I was there the day the war ended in ’45. I meanwhile had written to Oak Ridge again. I thought, well, I’ll just go to Oak Ridge to teach, so I wrote for another application. While I was in Louisville, I got a wire from Oak Ridge and they said I’d been assigned to Jefferson Junior High School, the old Jefferson where Robertsville is, and that was the first year for that junior high. We had two thousand students and there was six Physical Education teachers, three men, three women, and we had one gym.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, I bet that was a busy place.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, as long as the weather was good. I took that job and I came here in August and went through all the preliminary thing, the workshop at the first and everything and –
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for? Who was the principal then for Jefferson? Do you remember, offhand?
Ms. Gottshall: Mr. – oh, he was so nice. I can’t think what his name was.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, that’s okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Mr. Bonn was one of them. He was the Assistant Principal.
Mr. Kolb: Bonn? Bonn, B-O-N-N?
Ms. Gottshall: Bonn. He was here until he retired as principal. But the other one, I’ll think of his name, can’t think right now, but he was really, really nice. Well we had quite a few people and I taught 7th, 8th, and 9th grade just depending on what I was assigned, and when the weather got bad, we really had a problem, we had to have gym in the room and the 9th graders got to use the big gym. You know where Robertsville is; they’ve remodeled. Where the cafeteria is and the gym, that building has been added to some but it’s almost the same. Where the cafeteria is, that was the classroom. That was the old Robertsville School, and the 9th graders had their classes there. There were, I know Mrs. Marical was the Latin teacher and Mrs. Edwards was the English teacher and Mr. Clinton taught what they called Core and –
Mr. Kolb: Core?
Ms. Gottshall: Core, it was a combination of History and English.
Mr. Kolb: Oh the basic, okay, I see.
Ms. Gottshall: And Mr. Orlando was the physical education teacher.
Mr. Kolb: Nick Orlando?
Ms. Gottshall: Nick. He and I taught 9th grade in the big gym, if I had a 9th grade class. And Mr. Rice from up in East Tennessee was one of the men teachers, and he went back to around Kingsport the next year, I think, and Mr. Meffen came in and Mr. Stumiller came in, so those are the ones that taught there. There was another fellow that first year. He left, I think, when Mr. Rice did. The other gym teachers were Leola Hodge and Kathleen, well, she’s now Kathleen Shacter. Kathleen and Leola and I taught that first year.
Mr. Kolb: Is that John Shacter’s wife?
Ms. Gottshall: John Shacter’s.
Mr. Kolb: Wife?
Ms. Gottshall: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: She was Kathleen Williams and then she married Johnny, John, and she didn’t teach the next year and Pat Goode came in, so then it was Leola, me, and Pat. But that first year, when we didn’t have a gym – the gym hadn’t been built. Where the new gym, we called it – well, it was the new gym when they got it built, but now it’s the [old] gym because they’ve built another one. But we had to go to the classrooms, and a real funny thing happened. It wasn’t really funny when it happened, but I was in the classroom – I believe it was Mrs. Marical’s class. She taught 9th grade. She might have been teaching 8th then. She might have moved into the 9th grade later. But because she had this classroom and she did a lot of extra work – I know they were studying something about Italy and all that –
Mr. Kolb: Geography maybe?
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t think it was geography. I think it might have just been a classroom. But anyway, we were playing Bean Bag Toss in the classroom, and somebody threw the bean bag and knocked – she had on her desk this map with Sicily on it and Italy made out of that salt stuff, you know, combination. Somebody threw the beanbag and knocked Sicily off, and boy did that really upset me, because I knew she wasn’t going to be very happy about it. But finally, when they got the new gym, we did okay. We had two gyms, and –
Mr. Kolb: But you had two thousand students. That was a huge population. I mean, that’s bigger than the present day junior high.
Ms. Gottshall: No, it was about the same size.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: They were 7th, 8th, and 9th graders, and they were in classrooms. I really don’t know how many different individual classrooms. I know the 8th grade was in one section and 7th grade was back here. I can remember some of the teachers. There was a Miss Campbell and Mr. King.
Mr. Kolb: Boots Campbell?
Ms. Gottshall: Uh-huhn, she came about maybe two or three years after I did, but she taught 7th grade. And then there was, oh gosh, if I thought about it, I could name all of them I guess, but –
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, yeah, and I’m sure there’s a lot of turnover too, probably, in teachers.
Ms. Gottshall: No, surprisingly there wasn’t; teachers stayed.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get better pay here, you think, than other places?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, I know we did, yeah. We got better pay. I got more than I got in Etowah, and I got more than I got in Ohio, and Ohio was good.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Well it was over $200 a month, and that was pretty good, because when I first started teaching, I taught in Kentucky at Trigg County High School. I finished college in three and a half years and I was out in January, and so they were looking for teachers. See, that was the war, and teachers had left. They came up from Trigg County High School looking for an English teacher. I had minored in English, and I always liked English and Literature, and they needed a teacher down there, so I took that job for four months. But I decided then, I didn���t want to teach English because it was an awful lot of paper work, ’cause you had to grade every bit of homework, you did. And then when I went to Ohio, why – I told you what I taught there, and I minored in Biology and Physical Science, see, so I almost had a major in science. But since I had finished – if I had gone that next semester, I could have gotten a major in Science. But I’d been going to school and I thought I ought to work. But anyway, that first year, I got $85 a month at Freed County. Well, teachers didn’t make much then.
Mr. Kolb: No, but $200 is a lot more than $85.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, nobody made much, I mean, you know, salary range was down in everything. Well, then I went to Etowah and I made a hundred and, you know, I made more than $85. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was. Then I went to Ohio and I made more than I made in Etowah. But I came back from Ohio – even though my salary was going to be lower down here in Etowah, I came back into Tennessee because I didn’t like it in Ohio.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, the weather was a problem there. Well, let’s talk about then where you came here to live initially.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course, it was a real busy place. I mean the buses ran all night; the bus station was opened all night. They had city buses that went everywhere and I don’t really believe that I had to pay at first, that first year.
Mr. Kolb: Did you come by train?
Ms. Gottshall: I came by train.
Mr. Kolb: To where, Knoxville?
Ms. Gottshall: I came from Kentucky by train and I got off here at Elza Gate, and I believe they had some transportation for us. It wasn’t very far where we had to go for the office to be admitted. It was right inside Elza Gate where that liquor store is, somewhere right in there.
Mr. Kolb: To get processed and get your first badge.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes you had to get processed and get a badge and get assigned a place to live.
Mr. Kolb: So where did you go to live at first?
Ms. Gottshall: I lived at a new dormitory right there on the turnpike where the Red Cross building is. And they tore it down a couple years after.
Mr. Kolb: Where the new hospital building is, I guess.
Ms. Gottshall: No, it was directly across from where Tennessee Eastman was, right there on that corner where you turn up to go up to Tennessee. It was right there. And there I met a lot of – well a lot of teachers lived there. See, the housing – you couldn’t have a house – just a single individual couldn’t have a house. Now, there were some groups of people that got together and got houses. I don’t know how they did it because, actually, the houses were reserved for families that had certain jobs. I mean, you had to be sort of a permanent worker, and they didn’t consider teachers permanent, I believe. But anyway, I lived there in that dormitory that year. Then the next year I decided I’d move up to the one up near the old hospital, where the nurses stayed. You were here at the first, weren’t you?
Mr. Kolb: I lived in a dormitory in ��54 when I came here.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, you know those dormitories. The one I lived in down here was not like those others. Those first dormitories were probably a little bit nicer. But anyway, I got in a room up there.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have to share a room?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, you had to share a room. I guess you could have had a single. I don’t think you could’ve had a single room right at first. I never thought of [a] single room because they just assigned me to a room, and I had one bed and it had another one over here that somebody else was in it. But I had been teaching a year here and I met Margaret Bruner who taught out at my school, out at Jefferson, and she knew, she had been here the year before, and she had lived in a dormitory out there where the Garden Apartments are now and she knew some other teachers. Well, she asked me if I would like to move into an apartment with Margaret and Margaret and Margaret. Margaret Grills, Margaret Bruner, and Margaret Gottshall. By that time, the building was pretty much over, and a lot of people had moved out, and they had converted some dormitories out on Jefferson Circle to apartments, and so we got one of those apartments, and the three of us lived out there.
Mr. Kolb: Near Jefferson Circle?
Ms. Gottshall: On Jefferson Circle where those houses are, the houses they built out there. I’ve tried to remember exactly which driveway was ours. I don’t think they changed the driveways. But Margaret and Margaret and I lived out there for one year and then Margaret Bruner decided that she would go back to school, so she went to Chicago to be a church counselor or something, and so another teacher moved in with us, with Margaret Grills and me, Eloise Dempsey. Her father had been one of the very first people here with the engineer works. He was from New York and originally from South Carolina. He had been in the Army and he was the Truant Officer here. They lived up on Kentucky, right across from where the high school was. Eloise didn’t want to live at home; she’d finished college, so she wanted to live out. So she taught at Jefferson; she taught math. Margaret and I asked her if she wanted to move in our apartment with us, ’cause we’d lost Margaret Bruner, and she did, so we lived there, the three of us. Then we moved to the Brick Apartments when they were finished.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that, in the Brick Apartments?
Ms. Gottshall: Let me think.
Mr. Kolb: In the fifties, wasn’t it?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah it was in the fifties, ’cause I just lived there one – let’s see, I came in ’45 and I lived on Jefferson Circle, ’45, ’46, ’47, I guess, so I think the Brick Apartments had just been completed, ’cause I don’t believe anyone had lived where we moved. We lived at 248 North Purdue, the three of us, and we lived there for a while and then we decided we would move to the Garden Apartments. So the three of us moved to the Garden Apartments and we lived there for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: Was that when they first were opened up, too?
Ms. Gottshall: No, they had already been opened. See, I didn’t have a car and so I didn’t know much about Oak Ridge except what I knew getting on the bus in front of my dormitory that first year and riding out and getting off the bus out on the turnpike and walking through to the school over there, and I probably got off on Robertsville sometime too, because it was there. You know it was really funny, I – well I did get a ride lots of times. I knew a Mr. Jones and Kathleen Parker, and we’d lots of times get a ride to a certain place, you know, in the car, because Mr. Jones had a car.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, he worked at the Jefferson School?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, he was a ninth grade teacher, yeah. Kathleen was a seventh grade teacher.
Mr. Kolb: So you had to depend on the bus service until when? When did you get a car?
Ms. Gottshall: I finally got a car in – oh, I didn’t get a car until fifty – I think it was – well, I bought my sister’s car, secondhand car. It had a hundred thousand miles on it. It was a little roadster, but my brother-in-law – she was the one that lived in Somerset – he was real good with keeping the car in good shape, so it was a pretty good car. But I don’t think I had a car until around ’52, and I really didn’t know how to drive. I hadn’t driven because daddy didn’t teach me how to drive. He taught Katherine, but he didn’t teach me, and I went with him when he was teaching Katherine, and I decided I didn’t want him to teach me how to drive. But anyway, Nick Orlando taught me to drive.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, well that’s good.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, I can remember they were doing Drivers Ed then, and I got to – he taught me, and then he took me for the test and I passed it, and I got this car from my sister, and from then on I could go home in my own car. I usually got a ride with somebody from Kentucky: Marie Hines – she lived in Somerset, and then, the first year, Helen Caldwell was from Burnside, and I rode up with her some to Kentucky. Usually rode the bus.
Mr. Kolb: Now, talking about the local buses, did you ever get to ride on what they called cattle cars, those kind of rough buses that were real hard?
Ms. Gottshall: You mean where they just sat along the side?
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, those were mainly for plant people. I didn’t have to ride them because the city buses ��� that’s all I rode, the city buses. And like I say, I think at first it was free, and then it was a nickel, and then it became a dime. And it was really convenient to have the buses. That first year I lived up there, the bus station was right up here. That thing was open all night long. I mean there was just something going on all the time. You know where the filling station and the mortuary is? Okay, that was the Farmer’s Market, and I could walk up there from my dormitory. It was not buildings, as I recall; it was just tents. It was a wooden structure, I guess, with canvas put over it all the way up there, and they had good things, you know, they had fruit and vegetables.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Ms. Gottshall: And that’s where the market was, called the Farmer’s Market. And then right up the street was a real good eating place, really, oh gosh, why can’t I remember the names of those places? I didn’t think I’d ever forget them.
Mr. Kolb: On the Turnpike this was?
Ms. Gottshall: It was on the Turnpike right where the hospital is and there was an eating place there. Do you remember that?
Mr. Kolb: Snow White?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I had my first meal in Oak Ridge at the Snow White.
Ms. Gottshall: Snow White. I used to walk up there and eat at the Snow White, and I ate at the cafeteria. Mainly I ate at the cafeteria. We’d walk over to the cafeteria. It wasn’t very far from where I lived.
Mr. Kolb: They called it Central Cafeteria?
Ms. Gottshall: Central Cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: When I came here, I think it was called the T&C; I think Capiellos bought that some way.
Ms. Gottshall: It might have been called the T&C then, that first year that I was here, but I just think of it as the Central Cafeteria. I’ve got some chairs from that. You know where those chairs came from?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Ms. Gottshall: They came from Virginia from the Army Corps. They must have been from World War I, weren’t they? You know, those chairs you sat on up there, they’re Bentwood chairs.
Mr. Kolb: They could be, yeah, well made.
Ms. Gottshall: I got some of them.
Mr. Kolb: You bought them on surplus later on?
Ms. Gottshall: I bought them when they had some sellouts, and they’re not real comfortable to sit on.
Mr. Kolb: But they last; they’re sturdy. So you didn’t have a car. You got around on the bus. Where did you do your shopping? Up at Central Townsite?
Ms. Gottshall: I was near Jackson Square and I can remember standing in line to buy hose up at, let’s see, what was the name of that store?
Mr. Kolb: Loveman’s?
Ms. Gottshall: Taylor’s. There was a – right there, where those office buildings are, do you remember that store there?
Mr. Kolb: Well, there used to be Loveman’s there and then the bowling alley.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, Taylor’s was before Loveman’s. And then in the corner up there, up Jackson Square, there was a grocery store there. Was that the A&P? Do you remember?
Mr. Kolb: It was gone when I got here in ’54, so I don’t know.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, you didn’t come till ’54. Well I’m almost sure that that was a grocery store up there. I know it was a grocery store, ’cause at that time I smoked. Of course I quit later on, not too much later on, but I stood in line to buy cigarettes up there. I remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Now rationing was over then, when you got here after the war?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, but cigarettes were scarce because they were sending them all overseas. You know, I told you I was in Louisville the day that the war ended. I remember that. We went downtown. Katherine and Paul lived in a place called Inn Castle ’cause he was with the office of Corps of Engineers in Louisville at that time, ’cause they moved him around different places when they were building dams. He was in the land acquisition. We were downtown. I can remember all the people hollering and throwing stuff around the day the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: Did they say anything about Oak Ridge at that time? Had you heard about Oak Ridge being involved in the war?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course you did, because they dropped the bomb. My brother-in-law didn’t even know what they were buying this land for. He said, “You don’t even try to guess what they are building it for.” They were very, very strict. In fact, if they caught you making – see, I was here after the war, but before the war, if you made some statement like, “What are they doing here?” and stuff like that, they dismissed them, I understand. Now, of course, I wasn’t here, so I don’t know it firsthand, but I thought I had always heard that. Well, he told Katherine and me that you didn’t even talk about what they were doing over there; nobody did.
Mr. Kolb: And if you did, you got moved?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, of course, we were still restricted after the war.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh yeah. I had to have a badge to get in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, but you had a badge of course, yeah, sure.
Ms. Gottshall: And even to get into town.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Ms. Gottshall: And that went on, of course, for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: Till ’49 when the gates came down?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. ’Cause I know one time I was invited to go to Knoxville and play bridge, and there were three or four of us, and we got on the bus; we had to ride the bus then to Knoxville. We went over there to the – I think it was the Country Club.
Mr. Kolb: Deane Hill?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I don’t remember exactly where it was ’cause I wasn’t familiar with any of it. Well anyway, when I got on the bus, I discovered I hadn’t picked up my badge. See, I didn’t have to have my badge when I was just going to school. Now, if you’d worked at the plant, you had to wear your badge all the time, but I really didn’t have to show my badge.
Mr. Kolb: Except when you went out.
Ms. Gottshall: When I went out and wanted back in. So I was on the bus and the man got on the bus to check the badges. They checked them going out, but they weren’t real careful going out.
Mr. Kolb: So you slipped out without one.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, no, I had a badge then. This woman standing next to me had her work badge and her residence badge, so she said, “You can show him this one.” So I showed him that badge. And when I came in that night I didn’t have a badge, so I had to get off at the gate. I can’t even remember what gate we came in, but it must have been Elza Gate. Anyway, when we got to the gate, the guard got on to check all the badges and I said, “I don’t have mine, I must have forgotten it.” And he didn’t say, “How did you get out?” He just said, “Get off.” So I got off the bus and I went in the guard shed and he said, “Well, you’ll have to get somebody to get you in.” At that time, I think, I must have been in Jefferson Circle. But anyway, I called, and somebody – we didn��t lock our doors then. Nobody locked their doors. All the doors were left undone. So I called somebody, and they went in, and my badge was lying on the dresser, and they had a car and they came out and –
Mr. Kolb: They brought it to you.
Ms. Gottshall: Brought me the badge.
Mr. Kolb: Boy, you were lucky.
Ms. Gottshall: Yep.
Mr. Kolb: You were lucky, yeah. That’s interesting.
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t know what they would have done with me if I hadn’t have [had it] – but they knew I was a resident.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but they had to have that badge. Now was that the Army still checking on you when you came in at Elza Gate?
Ms. Gottshall: I guess it was. Yeah the Army was here for quite a while.
Mr. Kolb: What other kind of living conditions did you have to put up with?
Ms. Gottshall: People talk about the mud, but I don’t – now, I came in ’45 and we didn’t really have any sidewalks, but I don’t remember mud. We had wooden things to walk on.
Mr. Kolb: Boardwalks. You were not on some of the side streets going up the ridge; you were more around the turnpike.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, I was just going to Turnpike, and I wasn’t living up in the houses. This neighbor of mine told me that – they were here really early – they could put up a house in a day.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right.
Ms. Gottshall: And they’d go to work and come back and there would be a whole bunch more on the street.
Mr. Kolb: So much change, yeah. Well, you did have to put up with a lot of hassle, though, from the military and all the shortages of everything under the sun.
Ms. Gottshall: Of course, I wasn’t keeping a house, so I didn’t realize that. I was eating out at restaurants and things.
Mr. Kolb: You ate out most of the time until you got an apartment, in the brick apartments, I guess you’d say.
Ms. Gottshall: Well in the apartment, we never did go to Knoxville to buy groceries. We had the Farmer’s Market and then there were some stores here by then. At first, they didn’t have anything, I’m pretty sure.
Mr. Kolb: But did you go to Knoxville to shop for other things much?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, when you did much shopping you went, but I didn’t go much. I didn’t have any way to get there except on the bus.
Mr. Kolb: The buses still ran. Did you think the Knoxville people treated you okay as far as you know? Or were you looked at [as] being different, being from Oak Ridge?
Ms. Gottshall: You could tell a difference in teaching. We had to go to the East Tennessee Teachers Meeting, and that was in Knoxville every fall in October, and it was really funny when you’d have discussion in a group. You know, you had to tell your name and where you were from, and boy when you said Oak Ridge, people just thought, well, another one of those –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, one of those whatever.
Ms. Gottshall: They really were – they weren’t rude or anything, but you could sense that. Well they knew, I’m sure, that we had a lot of advantages that a lot of the schools didn’t have. I know we did, ’cause we had money. The schools had money. You could get equipment, you could get supplies, and I’m sure that they resented the ones –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a little jealously there.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, and of course there were teachers here from everywhere, I mean everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, so they weren’t locals like the rest of the people were.
Ms. Gottshall: No, they weren’t locals. Well, some of them were.
Mr. Kolb: But not all, right.
Ms. Gottshall: Not all together, because they went everywhere to find teachers. You know they were desperate if they wire me with [a job offer] – I never saw the superintendent until the day we had the picnic, the watermelon cutting up behind the Chapel on the Hill. See, I had turned down the one offer and then I applied again, and then they just wired and said I had been assigned to Jefferson Junior High School and I never saw him, Dr. Blankenship, until the day we had the picnic.
Mr. Kolb: I see, at the end of the first year?
Ms. Gottshall: No, the picnic was that year.
Mr. Kolb: Summertime?
Ms. Gottshall: When I got there. It was in September.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, okay.
Ms. Gottshall: We had sort of a picnic.
Mr. Kolb: To start off.
Ms. Gottshall: I think it was after Workshop one day or something. We had what they called ‘Workshop’ and it cut that down a lot. We used to have to meet two weeks before school and two weeks after school. The two weeks before school, that was preparing for school, and the two weeks after, that was completing everything.
Mr. Kolb: And you got paid for that, of course.
Ms. Gottshall: Yes, we got ten months’ pay, and that’s why we got the ten months’ pay, because we had Workshop. You see, Oak Ridge has always – I don’t remember whether they still do or not, but we always went to school longer than anybody else in Tennessee.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: There are a certain number of days required, but we did more.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, then you had that extra time added on too. But you did think the other teachers kind of looked at you with envy, maybe, a little bit?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, yeah, they weren’t really happy with our ideas, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, even the ideas.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, you know, when you – and like I say, there were teachers from a lot of places and they had different ideas.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s probably true, not the traditional way of doing things.
Ms. Gottshall: No, but I don’t think anybody was ever mean to anybody.
Mr. Kolb: No, but just different, yeah.
Ms. Gottshall: They just, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Oak Ridgers were different.
Ms. Gottshall: And eventually Oak Ridge teachers got in positions of leadership in East Tennessee and in the state. They eventually accepted Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, that’s the way it is now, that’s right. But it took a long time, I’m sure. Well, let’s talk about some of the activities you did for fun and enjoyment when you were here, like the recreational activities. You taught during the daytime, but you didn’t teach all night. You didn’t have that homework like you said you didn’t want to have.
Ms. Gottshall: No. Now, in physical education, we did give tests, written tests; the women did. The men didn’t always give them, but the women did. I did have to grade papers in physical education. I didn’t in Etowah.
Mr. Kolb: But that’s not recreation.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, we had a show; we had a movie here. This was sometime after I’d been here, I guess, five years. Well, I was teaching, I was volunteering to teach Red Cross class in – oh, it wasn’t Red Cross. What was it? I had an exercise group at the high school and townspeople could come in. Well this woman that was in the group said was I interested in going on up in the Smokies, you know, to the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club, and I said yeah, I would like to. She was a member; her name was Phyllis Brown at the time. So she invited me to go up in the cabin in the Greenbrier. The club doesn’t have it any longer, but they used to have it. And so we were going up there, and that was the first time I’d ever gone. Even though I’m from Kentucky, I wasn’t familiar with mountains. I lived down south of Lexington, and that’s the foothills and the hills, but it’s not mountains. And I had gone to the Smokies, to Gatlinburg, with some teachers one Sunday, and I think it was the guidance counselor at the junior high. She invited me, and her name was – was that Margaret Barnes? I think it was. She’s not here anymore. She invited about four or five of us to go to Gatlinburg and eat. That used to be one of the big things.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s a hotel there?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Mountain View?
Ms. Gottshall: Mountain View. There were three that were real good.
Mr. Kolb: Oh okay, I remember the Mountain View.
Ms. Gottshall: They��re gone now.
[Side B]
Ms. Gottshall: When she and I used to go to have lunch up there, we went up to Gatlinburg, and I just couldn’t believe the hills.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. You’d never seen mountains like that?
Ms. Gottshall: I had never seen mountains like that. If I had, it didn’t make that much impression on me, because it was really good. Going to Gatlinburg was not like it is now. You had to go up and around a little bitty narrow road up around where Pigeon Forge is. They made that road like that. We used to go up around that hill someway, and that was really exciting to see the mountain.
Mr. Kolb: For the first time, yeah.
Ms. Gottshall: And then Phyllis invited me to go to this [Smoky Mountain] Hiking Club meet at the cabin. They were going to spend the night, and I think I borrowed some things, something to sleep in, a sleeping bag, and a pack, and there were going to be quite a few up there. We used to meet up there and sleep. They had two cabins. This Hiking Club had built it. See that Hiking Club is real old; it started 1926. On the way up there, we passed a little boy. Phyllis had been in the Hiking Club for about a year or maybe more and we passed this boy that she knew was in the Hiking Club. He was hitchhiking up to the Smokies, so we picked him up and took him on up there, and we were the first ones there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, beat everybody else there.
Ms. Gottshall: No, wasn’t anybody else there. It was early in the afternoon, and other people were going to get up there after work. So we went out to the cook shed and cooked our meal, and then we went in the lower cabin and built a big fire and were sitting there, you know, waiting for the other people to come. Now this was in the fall, and it was cool up there, so we were sitting there with the door closed, and all of a sudden we heard this scratching on the door. Of course, I had never heard anything about bears or anything, so Phyllis said, “Gosh that sounds like a bear.” And this boy was about fifteen and we were real excited about the bear.
Mr. Kolb: There was a bear?
Ms. Gottshall: And it kept going like that. So they had some tools in there. Well I picked up this axe and I thought, well, if he knocks the door in, I’ll just hit him in the head. Well he just kept on scratching. We decided to go upstairs; there was a loft. So we went upstairs to the loft and there were some shingles up there they had, so we kept throwing shingles out between the thing to try to scare him off.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. You could see him?
Ms. Gottshall: No, you couldn’t see out there, but you could hear him. So then he went around to the other door and scratched. Then we heard people coming. We could hear them way down at the creek, where they had to cross the creek, and so we went back downstairs. We were all excited because of this bear, and on the door you could see these marks. Well, they said they didn’t see any bear around when they came up. So we slept in sleeping bags, and there was crowd down here in this cabin and a crowd up there in that cabin. There were two cabins there. They were sort of joined. They had brought them down from somewhere. They were real old cabins. The next morning, I was lying in my sleeping bag in there and these two men were standing up at the fireplace talking, and this one man said, “I just tore my fingernails all to pieces last night.” These two men were out there teasing, you know, making like a bear at the door.
Mr. Kolb: It wasn’t a bear after all?
Ms. Gottshall: No it wasn’t a bear.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, for goodness sakes.
Ms. Gottshall: It was a man from Nashville and a man that lived over in Knoxville, and they thought they’d just tease us, and they said they just rolled on the ground out there. Well then I realized.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause you said there was a bear outside.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, we thought it was bear and they just had the –
Mr. Kolb: The biggest old laugh, but you heard them talking about it.
Ms. Gottshall: But I heard them talking about it. They didn’t know I was still there I guess.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the secret was out. Oh, my.
Ms. Gottshall: But I’ve been in the Hiking Club now since 1953, well, ’52 really. Of course, I can’t hike anymore, but I used to hike. I used to hike every other weekend after I got in it from ’52 on until about ’82. I hiked about every other weekend, and that’s what I did for recreation.
Mr. Kolb: Did you join a church when you came here?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh yeah, I’d already belonged to the church. I joined the church in Munfordville, Kentucky when I was twelve, and so I just moved my membership down here to Trinity.
Mr. Kolb: Methodist church?
Ms. Gottshall: Methodist. When we lived on Jefferson Circle, I believe there was a bowling alley out there, right above that drug store.
Mr. Kolb: I believe there was. I never saw it.
Ms. Gottshall: I don’t know whether it was a bowling alley or just a sports –
Mr. Kolb: A recreation hall?
Ms. Gottshall: Recreation, it was just a recreation hall. It wasn’t a bowling alley. It was the recreation hall for that section. You know, there were recreation halls in every different section.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, like this one here. This is a rec hall.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. Of course, when it became the Wildcat Den, it was just for kids. I used to chaperone here when I taught at the high school.
Mr. Kolb: But there was bowling.
Ms. Gottshall: No, that was a recreation hall out there, where we had church, and then they built that church up there where it is now. When I moved up to the Brick Apartments, I changed my membership and moved it up to First Church because I could walk to the church. At that time, when I moved to the Brick Apartments, I got a car. That’s when I got that car.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, so you could get around pretty good then.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. But I didn’t get it right at first, and then when I moved to the Garden Apartments, I did have a car. I got a new car. I just kept that first car one year, and then I bought me a new Oldsmobile, when I lived in the Garden Apartments.
Mr. Kolb: But there were a lot of opportunities for recreation here that probably most towns didn’t have, right, like the Playhouse and things like that?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. Well, the Playhouse wasn’t where it is now.
Mr. Kolb: No, I know but, I mean –
Ms. Gottshall: It was a movie theater. We went to the movie theater. There was a movie – let’s see – oh, I went to the museum out there, you know, the science museum. It was out where that cafeteria used to be out at Jefferson Circle. That was the first museum. That’s where I went at the first. That’s when I first went to the museum and I got one of those dimes that they –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, irradiated –
Ms. Gottshall: Radiated dimes.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t that open the day that the city opened in ’49? I heard that that’s when the museum opened first.
Ms. Gottshall: I know it was there when I lived in Goldsboro. That was the name of the – Goldsboro Apartments – that’s the name of the –
Mr. Kolb: At Jefferson.
Ms. Gottshall: At Jefferson, Goldsboro. It finally came to me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good, I never knew that. They’re gone now of course, unfortunately. So there was plenty to do here as a single person and kept you busy. But after the war, I guess the security issue sort of went away gradually. I mean, you had to have your badge to get in and out.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, you know, when they took the gates down – oh, the day they took the gates, they opened – I was –
Mr. Kolb: You were here then?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I went on the bus out to Solway Bridge, to that gate out there, somewhere out there, and got on the bus and rode a city bus out, and I got on the bus that was bringing those people in that were here to celebrate the opening of the gates.
Mr. Kolb: The notary –
Ms. Gottshall: They asked for volunteers. So I volunteered to go out to – and I don’t remember too much about that. I know –
Mr. Kolb: Did you march in the parade they had?
Ms. Gottshall: No, I didn’t march in the parade, but I watched the parade. I’m not very much for marching in parades.
Mr. Kolb: I just wondered.
Ms. Gottshall: Or riding on things.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I heard they had a representative of every state in the union, practically.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, yeah, and a man was here on the horse, and there was a movie star here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, several movie stars. Marie MacDonald was one of them.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. It was very exciting.
Mr. Kolb: And Alvin Barkley, Senator Barkley, I think, was here.
Ms. Gottshall: For the gates to open.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right. A lot of speeches, and I understood the townspeople initially didn’t want the gates to go away. They wanted to keep the gates up so they could keep their doors unlocked and have the security of having everyone –
Ms. Gottshall: Well, it was nice to not have to worry.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, not have to worry about that.
Ms. Gottshall: I know my brother came to see me when I lived – now, even after the gates went down, we didn’t necessarily lock our doors, because we were so used to – but my brother came to see me and I wasn’t at home. Well, they walked up to the door, you know, and he tried it and it was open, and they just went on in. He jumped all over me. He said, “Margaret, you ought to have more sense than to go off and leave your house opened.”
Mr. Kolb: So did you start locking your door then?
Ms. Gottshall: I doubt it. We did eventually. I know we did eventually because one night out at the Garden Apartments we got home and the door was locked and we didn’t have the key and there was three of us living there. So we managed to get the kitchen window up, and I climbed in the window since I was probably the most active one of the bunch. The others were all young but they weren’t real active. So I climbed in the window and opened the door so we could get in.
Mr. Kolb: Found a way. Well let me ask you one thing. This may not strike you as being important, but did you have much contact with the Afro-Americans in town early on when you came?
Ms. Gottshall: I didn’t really have – well, let me think – it was in college. We had a maid at Western that I really – she was so nice, you know. I had never in my whole life really been associated with Afro-Americans, because even though I lived in little towns, and they were in the population, you know –
Mr. Kolb: And the schools were segregated back then, so you didn’t have any black –
Ms. Gottshall: The schools were segregated. In Somerset, they had a school and we had a school. I went to high school in Somerset, Kentucky. We had moved to different places, but I went back there and went to high school and lived with my sister.
Mr. Kolb: But they were segregated there too, of course.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, so I really hadn’t had any contact.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anybody on the staff at Jefferson Junior High that was, like custodians?
Ms. Gottshall: No, I don’t believe we had. We had none until I got to the high school. I remember when segregation stopped. It was very unusual, you know, and I had some students, black students, that were very good. In fact, even though I grew up in the south, I really never had prejudice about it. I didn’t know them. But like I say, there was a maid at college, and she was so nice. I worked at the library and she was a maid at the library, you know, real nice person and I really enjoyed her. And then when I got them in school, it was different, and of course our high school was so different. We didn’t have a lot of feeling. We did have some sit ins, sit downs at the high schools.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Before it was desegregated?
Ms. Gottshall: After we had the black students. I can remember them sitting down in the lobby. I don’t know what brought it on.
Mr. Kolb: They were protesting something, you mean.
Ms. Gottshall: I guess they just weren’t happy. I know one time, we did have – at that big elm tree out there down by the gym – I went to school one morning and they had hanged a thing on it. That was taken down, and nothing was made of it. We really did not have the prejudice that you found in the other schools around here. Clinton, you know, they bombed the school. I can remember when integration first started. Ben Martin was the coach, the basketball coach.
Mr. Kolb: Coached everything, didn’t he?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, at first he did, but when I got here, he was not coaching everything. He was the basketball coach, and we had football coaches and track coaches for the boys. The girls didn’t have any until 1976. Girls had nothing. We didn’t even have a basketball team until ’76 because the – I don’t know what the reason was. Apparently, the administration just was not in favor of girls athletics. Now, we did everything in school. I mean, we played basketball. We really had a good program of physical education at this high school when they were having it. They don’t have physical education now, but we had everything. But anyway, I’ll go back to when the basketball team – we had black students on the basketball team, and there were schools that wouldn’t play us because we did. But Coach Martin was one of these people – he was very fair fellow, I mean he was a really good fellow. I liked him. He was from Kentucky. He went to the University of Kentucky.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s how the name Wildcat got associated with Oak Ridge High School I heard.
Ms. Gottshall: I really don’t know what town he was from in Kentucky, but I know he went to UK. He was a real physical education teacher plus a coach. It’s hard to get that combination sometimes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s right, and be good at it, and do it as long as he did.
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. At first, in teaching, we didn’t have any girls sports; we had nothing except in gym class. Well, Mary Cooper and I used to get teams together. UT was very good about – and then there were a lot of church teams. The girls played in church teams. I used to get the stars from all the church teams and get them together to go and play at Chilhowee Park. They won the tournament. But I wasn’t a basketball coach; they won it in spite of me.
Mr. Kolb: But they didn’t know that, see.
Ms. Gottshall: But they knew how to play basketball. When UT used to have track meets – we were trying to get track introduced in Tennessee for girls. They had boys track for years, but they had no girls track. So they would have ‘play days,’ they called it. I’d always get a gang of kids together and go over there and be in the play day and we eventually –
Mr. Kolb: At UT?
Ms. Gottshall: At UT. And then I’d gone and done my masters at Peabody and I had a teacher over there – he’s the coach at – oh, David Lipscomb – so he was interested in track too. He was a swimming person but he also was interested in track because he had a daughter who liked track, I think. He called me and asked me if I could organize track here and have a meet, and he’d have one in middle Tennessee, and then West Tennessee didn’t have one right at first, but they did later on and pretty good. So I had the first regional track meet here. It wasn’t sanctioned yet – you know, it had to be – but we had a regional track meet and had a lot of them, a lot of kids here. Then the next year, Pat Goode was teaching at Karns, and she had it. The next year it became sanctioned in Tennessee. And we had girls track in ’76, and the same year they had basketball. Sue Darthavan coached the first basketball because she had played on a church team. She wasn’t born here, but she was one of my students back when I first started teaching. Then she went to college and came back and taught at the high school. So she coached the first basketball, and the same year that track was sanctioned, girls basketball was allowed to form here in Tennessee, in Oak Ridge. It was already sanctioned in the state.
Mr. Kolb: What teams did you play? Did you have teams around here to play right away?
Ms. Gottshall: On the track?
Mr. Kolb: No, basketball.
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, she just went into the regular –
Mr. Kolb: I mean, other schools started up at the same time, and they had teams?
Ms. Gottshall: Oh, they were already playing. Tennessee played basketball when I was at Etowah, ’cause I coached it. I mean, the girls played.
Mr. Kolb: Just Oak Ridge didn’t have it.
Ms. Gottshall: Just Oak Ridge didn’t have it. Then eventually they got all the things: soccer, softball, track, basketball for girls. Because they found out the girls were strong enough to do that, I guess; I don’t know why.
Mr. Kolb: Once they open the door wide, they came charging in.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, back when – now, I said Kentucky didn’t have basketball. They used to back when I was an eighth grader. They had teams in Kentucky, girls teams, ’cause I used to go – I mean, when we moved to Monticello, my brothers played basketball and my dad always went to the games. They played football, too, and he always went to those games. Well, I went with Daddy. I was six years old and they were in high school, and I’d go to the basketball games with Daddy, and the girls were playing, too, then. And Daddy always liked to go early because he liked to watch the girls games because they always got in fights. They’d roll on the floor and pull hair, as I remember. I was just six, you know, and I couldn’t figure. I wouldn’t sit with Dad; I’d go around with the kids. But I remember looking, and they’d go up to shoot foul shots, and I noticed that sometimes they’d take one shot and sometimes they’d take two. So I devised the idea that it was something about the numbers on the back of their uniforms that determined whether they got one or two.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you figured it out eventually. Right?
Ms. Gottshall: Well, yeah. I finally figured out how they got it.
Mr. Kolb: Fouled in the act of shooting, right? Well, what other unique experiences can you remember about your early days in Oak Ridge, Margaret? Anything stand out that was different or made it memorable? I’m sure you had a lot of experiences in the classroom that were kind of interesting or unique, but just in general.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, it was just so different from a regular town. Like [in] Somerset, you had [the] central part of town, you had stores, and of course, Oak Ridge wasn’t that way.
Mr. Kolb: All strung out. Different shopping centers.
Ms. Gottshall: That to me was – and, you know, I went through here one time. This was after I was teaching at Etowah, went through on the bus. The buses went through, but you couldn’t get off.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right? You mean, you came through on the state highway, down the turnpike basically?
Ms. Gottshall: But you couldn’t get off, because you weren’t a resident.
Mr. Kolb: That was during the war?
Ms. Gottshall: It must have been, because we went through here one time. I had to go home. I had a hard time getting to Elizabethtown, Kentucky from this part of Tennessee. I had to go to Knoxville and get on a bus and go up 27 to Somerset. After Mom and Daddy moved back there, it was not hard, but when I had to go to Elizabethtown – that’s where we lived when I first came here – I had a roundabout way to go. Sometimes I had to go to Nashville. If I wanted to go on the train – trains were still running then – I went to Clinton and got on the train and then I had to transfer. It was a very, very difficult way to get to – I had to get on the train at a place called Boston, Kentucky, which was outside of Elizabethtown.
Mr. Kolb: And then transfer there?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well Oak Ridge had a lot of younger people.
Ms. Gottshall: Oak Ridge was isolated, really. Of course, they picked it for that reason.
Mr. Kolb: But it was so busy, so many people here. Even after the war, there was a lot of people here.
Ms. Gottshall: Well, what year was that? It was 1949, I guess. You know, when I came there was seventy thousand people. Well, it was about three or four years after I came that, wham, you know, it went down. Tennessee Eastman moved out, and the construction – all of that moved out, and I remember when I came where downtown is was all trailers.
Mr. Kolb: And hutments.
Ms. Gottshall: It was trailers.
Mr. Kolb: Just trailers? Okay.
Ms. Gottshall: Hutments were way out on the turnpike. I didn’t see many of them because I didn’t have any way to get out there, but I knew they were out there, and where the high school is now was trailers. All of that was trailers. There were flattops on Hamilton Circle right off of Hillside. I remember when they moved the trailers out, over here at downtown there wasn’t anything there, and when it got dry that dirt would just blow and we used to call it the Great Oak Ridge Desert, because it was really very dusty. We’d have dust storms when it would blow, and then they built downtown. That was in ’54, wasn’t it?
Mr. Kolb: I came in ’54, just after that, because there was still so few shopping – there still was a shopping center there, Midtown Shopping Center was there, and they knocked that down to make the original shopping center.
Ms. Gottshall: You know, there was a Bruner’s store right off the turnpike there where you go into Downtown.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, right there where the – you remember the Da Wabbit?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, vaguely.
Ms. Gottshall: The Da Wabbit was there. That was one of the main places to go get something to eat and to tour around, you know, drive around the Da Wabbit. Of course, that was high school kids. Well, it wasn’t high school kids mainly, either, because high school kids didn’t have cars then.
Mr. Kolb: It was younger people, looking for a date.
Ms. Gottshall: Of course, later on they got cars, but they didn’t have a lot of cars in ’54.
Mr. Kolb: That was a different time wasn’t it? A lot of things have stayed the same; a lot of things have changed.
Ms. Gottshall: Now, I started to tell you – you know, I said I went through here on the bus and I looked out. I thought, well, boy, this is one place I sure hope I don’t ever have to live.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? And two years later you were here.
Ms. Gottshall: It’s funny what statements we make. I know I used to say when I was in high school, “Well, there’s one thing I’ll never be. I’ll never be a teacher. Teacher is the last thing I’ll ever be.”
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah. I wanted to be a nurse and Mom didn’t want me to be a nurse. So I went to a teachers’ college, ended up being a teacher, and teaching was the very last thing I ever did, for forty-four years.
Mr. Kolb: You taught forty-four years?
Ms. Gottshall: I taught forty-four years and four months and nine weeks.
Mr. Kolb: And how many minutes?
Ms. Gottshall: Well I count it like that because one summer – this was in 1949, I believe – I went home. The first summer I was here, I worked on the playground. That was a unique experience. They used to have playgrounds in all the schools. They still do, I think. But it was different. You went out and stayed all day at the playground and they had –
Mr. Kolb: Now this was working for the city?
Ms. Gottshall: Yeah, Recreation Department, and you took care of the kids all day long. You were sort of a paid babysitter for the City and I know I was at Glenwood, the old Glenwood and I can still remember a girl I had out there, Ellen Sherwood. Now why I remember her I don’t know, but she came every day to the playground. She did artwork, you know, she liked to draw. She was a kid about twelve, something like that. Anyway, at the playground you had a softball team; you had to organize a softball team. Well, I had lots of little boys, no girls, just boys on the softball team. I organized my team, and then we’d get on the bus and we’d go to different schools and play them. I just worked the playground one summer.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of a busy life, wasn’t it?
Ms. Gottshall: I decided I’d go home in the summer. So one summer, went home. The next summer, I went home and I looked for a job and I went to this factory where they made clothes. I thought, well, I could, for nine weeks I could. I didn’t even know how to work a machine, but I thought they could tell me. But he didn’t want to hire me for nine weeks because he’d have to train me, and if I was only going to stay nine weeks, he didn’t want to fool with it. So I thought, well, I’ll just go where I know what I’m doing. So I went to the school superintendent and he said, “Yes, I’ll hire you.” He said, “I’ve got a country school.” Kentucky still had country schools then, one room school, and this teacher was going to UK to finish her degree. So he said, “I’ve got a school down at Hardin Springs that I need a teacher for,” and so I said, well, I’d take it. I didn’t have a car then, but my sister was there, the one that was married to the Corps of Engineer fellow. He was in Louisville but they couldn’t find an apartment for children, that would take children. They had two little children, so she had to come home and he lived in a hotel, I think. But they couldn’t find any place to live, so she was at home that summer, so she took me down. It was twenty-five miles from Elizabethtown and it was on a gravel road and it had a mill and a grocery store and a post office and a few houses scattered. I had twenty-three kids in school in a one room school, and when we got down there, Mom said, “Well you can’t stay here.” I said, “Well I sure will because I’ve already told the man I would do it.” So I stayed and taught them.
Mr. Kolb: Now where did you live?
Ms. Gottshall: I lived at a home.
Mr. Kolb: With a family?
Ms. Gottshall: They had two kids and I had a room there and then I walked to school. She fixed me a lunch. That was a really nice – I enjoyed that. I taught kids to read and I didn’t even know the first thing about it because I didn’t do elementary education – see, I was secondary. But they were really nice kids.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you had an interesting career Margaret, I must say. You’ve come a long way in those years. Okay, I guess that will do it and I thank you very much. Okay?
Ms. Gottshall: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
[end of recording]